Does having shorter URLs help with rankings?

[fablau]

Hello here.I own an e-commerce website (virtualsheetmusic.com), and some of our most important category pages have pretty long URLs. Here is an example:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html

I am evaluating the possibility to shorten URLs like the above to something like:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/violin/

But since it is going to pretty hard and time consuming (considering the custom system we have in place on that site), I am trying to find out if it really matters and worth doing it from a SEO stand point. I am aware that from a user prospective shorter URLs are preferable, and we plan to pursue a better URL architecture on our website in the near future just for that, but this question, at the moment, should be strictly related to SEO.

Any thoughts on this topic are very welcome!

[Davenport-Tractor]

Fabrizo,

Google loves when all your keywords, Page titles, Meta Descriptions all are in the same order, length, spelling and so forth, even though meta keywords show little or no effect as of late. Same goes for the URL's.

A perfect page would have the exact same URL, as Page title, Keyword, and meta description. So if your starting from scratch that may be a target to aim for. As far as URL length there may be a limit but its going to be a high number like 2083 characters.

I guess probably the best yay to choose the URL is to take a look at the Page Title name guidelines which is 20 to 70 characters. Now you can match the URL to page title with 70 characters.

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Fabrizo,

Shorter URLs are preferred. In your example I personally feel it makes sense to remove download and indici from your URL struture, because that information does not mean anything to me, the user (maybe it does to someone who plays violins... so that statement might not be true, but to me that information is irrelevant).

Now are you going to go from page 2 to page 1 with a change like this... maybe? There aren't any hard facts that will say how big of an impact that will make; however, the closer a keyword is to your domain in terms of your URL, the more weight is assessed to it in terms of keyword association - if that makes sense. So...

domain.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html appears less relevant than domain.com/violin/ if a user is searching for "violin".

Also, Dr. Pete wrote an article a few years ago on changing URLs for SEO purposes. I think that all of the information still stands true for today.

Hope this helps,

Mike

[danatanseo]

Hi Fabrizio,

Mike's answer is a good one and I would also definitely recommend Dr. Pete's post.

What I would like you to be aware of is the risk in what you are wanting to do. If you are already ranking well, for the love of all that is holy in this world, leave your URLs alone. Here is what Dr. Pete had to say about the "risk factor:"

"All Change Is Risky

I know it’s not what the motivational speakers want you to hear, but in the real world, change carries risk. Even a perfectly executed site-wide URL change – with pristine 301-redirects – is going to take time for Google to process. During that time, your rankings may bounce. You may get some errors. If your new URL scheme isn’t universally better than the old one, some pages may permanently lose ranking. There’s no good way to A/B test a site-wide SEO change.

More often, it’s just a case of diminishing returns. Going from pretty good to pretty gooder probably isn’t worth the time and effort, let alone the risk." - Dr. Pete Meyers

You need to manage expectations on this one if you decide to go forward and make stakeholders aware that they could be looking at a significant downside (decrease in traffic and links) immediately after implementation. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be a significant upside eventually, but there are no guarantees.

I love your site by the way. My daughter and I have been subscribers on and off for years. Cheers!

Dana

[fablau]

Wow, thank you so much guys for your replies and insights, and thank you Dana for your kind reply! I am so glad to know about your daughter

The fact is that actually we have pretty good rankings for our major category pages such as the violin page above (currently ranking 6th for "violin sheet music") but we have noticed tat we have been dropping down, gradually and steadily. We used to be at the first spot with "violin sheet music" with that page from 2003 to 2011.

So... I personally don't like to risk losing traffic from those very important category pages, that despite are not indexed at the top spots, are still giving us a lot of traffic since we are anyway on the 1st page. What do you think?

Thank you again!

Best,

Fabrizio

[danatanseo]

Hi again Fabrizio,

Have you thought about experimenting with a couple? Perhaps choose two categories that may have slipped from page 1 to page 2, or even the top of page one to the bottom of page 1. re-write the URLs and then track the results. If you get the desired result, then move on gradually to update the others. This way you mitigate risk, but still find out whether or not it's something you might benefit from.

Just a thought.

Dana

[fablau]

That's a great idea Dana, thank you for the suggestion. I will try that with some of our less performing category pages, then I'll post the results here.

Thank you again!

Best,

Fabrizio